1. basic RAW edit
2. added black gradient fill layer (adjusted to 40%) to take care of some of the excessive side light (I have terrible lighting in my house, so I take most of my pictures right by the kitchen window. If it is an item I am photographing, it often goes on the counter, and the light from the window lights up its side. My next house will have great light.
3. CS Urban grit brushed on to cookie cutter @ 100%
4. placed scratch texture, adjusted to overlay blending mode, 50% opacity,
brushed off cookie cutter with brush @ 50%

SOOC:

1. used magic extractor to select my husband's hand and make background black (many thanks to Lindsay at Looking for Strawberries for searching for and sending me a tutorial on how to use this wonderful tool!)
2. adjusted tone of hand
3. selected heart and brightened a bit, increased saturation
4. added gaussian blur to hand

I totally cheated with this one! I wanted to replace the background with a black background, but I just couldn't get the magic extractor to work on her hair wispies without taking up time I really don't have. So I went and bought a piece of black velvet fabric, which I should have done a long time ago, and re-shot the SOOC:

1. basic RAW edit
2. crop
3. high pass filter and blended in soft light, adjusted to 50%
4. desaturated a bit (I am not a big fan of BRIGHT RED unless it's on a barn or STOP sign. Or apparently my lips as we saw last week, but I wasn't a huge fan of that either; I just did it because the theme was red.)
5. added a gradient layer to soften the glare on her face a bit (still trying to learn to use my new Speedlight.)

SOOC:

I know - there are no hearts in this photo! I just couldn't work well around her arm, and I loved her face so much, I wanted to focus on that. Here are the edits:
1. basic RAW edits
2. selected inverse - blurred background
3. CS Perfect Portrait - used color pop, skin smoothing, and vignette
4. CS Johnna's Tea Party with contrast @ 15%

Here's what I am learning so far in my photographer journey. I need to really work on exposure. I am metering my pictures correctly, but I am still having to constantly up the exposure when I edit them in RAW. Maybe it's because I am inside ALL THE TIME?? (Have I mentioned there has been A LOT of snow up here for our first winter in the Arctic?) That maybe mixed with the poor lighting - perhaps I just need to overexpose them a bit on the meter. Anyway, just thinkin' out loud...

I love so much of what you're doing in editing. As for exposure and having to increase it in post-processing...there are various schools of thought on this. I too, love a brighter image. Run a test - get a perfect exposure and then bump it up a notch so your image looks (in camera) just a touch over-exposed. 9 times out of 10 you can pull it back if needed in editing, but that will reduce some of the noise you may experience when increasing the brightness later. Does that make sense?

You did a great job on the hand shot! I love the red cookie cutter one too...and the ones of your daughter are just PRECIOUS! You're doing such a good job editing!

As far as exposure goes, are you shooting in JPG or RAW? If you shoot in RAW, you have 1/3 of a stop in either direction you can go without losing any image quality...you can actually edit closer to a full stop without losing much most of the time.

I find too, that sometimes my shots come out over exposed, but look great on my camera, if I have my LCD screen too bright (ie my valentines day shoot!)

Amazing, Lady!! You rocked all these!! I have several favs: both cookie cutter shots (what a great use of texture on that 2nd one!!) the one you reshot to get the right background (nothing wrong with that!) and the first one w/ your girl all dolled up. Just great...

Now, would you be so kind as to share the secret magic extractor with me??? lol! But if you saw my post (I haven't been able to keep up w/ my comments yet!) you saw that I'm not to into creative editing right now, so maybe I don't want to know about the magic extractor!! lol!!